So, suppose humans got a gene mutation that allowed them to teleport

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You know, the classic “I’m in Dallas and I want to be in New York, so I just twitch my nose and concentrate for a second and ZAP I vanish from here and reappear in Central Park” type of teleportation.

It occurs to me that this might cause some difficulties. Like a hundred million people all decide they want to drop in on the seventh game of the World Series. Or pay a quick visit to Fort Knox. That sort of thing.

But, how would you know exactly where you need to reappear?

Because it appears to be an illusion that we’re standing still. A few minutes of Googling reveals that someone standing near the equator is being yanked around about 463.24 meters per second just by Earth’s rotation. Then the Earth is revolving, at around 30 KILOMETERS pre second, so there’s that. And the Milky Way is spinning around the galaxy’s center at around * 200* kilometers a second. And the whole galaxy is undoubtedly whipping along at some other obscene speed. Oh, and the whole universe is expanding at some I got tired of googling but no doubt amazing speed. And who knows what all else.

So how would we ever figure/intuit exactly how far and in which direction we need to jump? Is this something your mobile phone could calculate for you?

2

I think that mutation would have to be accompanied by a remote viewing/targeting gene to be remotely (heh) safe.

3

You sumarized my objections against time travel pretty well. I still say: no chance.

4

Instantaneous travel should take care of the universal movement problem, but a built in “occupying already occupied territory” factor still exists…until enough incidents cause the earth’s population to decrease to acceptable levels.

5

You’re assuming the motion has to be in absolute space-centric coordinates. Which is a non-sequitur in the first place as there is no absolute reference frame in space. Even trying to define jumping in specific direction for a specific distance falls apart since there’s no absolute directional frame either.

Why wouldn’t teleporting navigation be Earth-centric just like conventional ground, water, or airborne nav is? Once you’re inventing magic there’s benefit in making the magic as useful as possible.


I think the first order of business after inventing teleportation will be inventing a teleportation shield. So banks can keep interlopers out of vaults, prisons can keep inmates inside, celebrities can keep creeps out of their bedrooms and bathrooms, etc.

A world suddenly without locks would be a very confusing place for awhile.

6

Some of Larry Niven’s books included cheap teleporters (though you still needed a device at both ends), and flash mobs were one of the consequences he anticipated from it.

7

Dr. Raymond Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddmore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - MASS HYSTERIA!

Also, since private property would become impossible–Socialism.

8

Which Invisible Man rules are we playing by? Does your teleporting gene let you influence matter beyond your own body. If so, how much? There’s not much point in teleporting into Fort Knox if you can’t teleport anything out. And who wants to attend a baseball game buck naked?

9

Yes, that would be a necessity for any long-distance teleportation. Otherwise, teleportation would be restricted to your sightline. I’ve seen that mentioned as a reasonable restriction for certain comic book characters with teleportation abilities, or tabletop RPGs that include teleportation as an ability.

Even if you only teleport by sight, your “aim” matters. Too high, you fall and can hurt yourself. Too low, you’re in the ground a little bit. Or off to the side, oops, you’re partially in a wall. And do you displace things out of the way, like air, or airborne particles? What if there’s a leaf or a small piece of paper that drifts into the spot mid-teleport? What if it’s raining, snowing, hailing? Does it get pushed out of the way, or do you absorb it into yourself as you merge? After all, unless you’re in space or some special chamber, you’re not teleporting into a vacuum; you’re always occupying a space that had something in it, even if it’s only gas.

Which brings up two convenient mechanics for teleportation that make it simpler. I call them “displacement” and “replacement”.

With displacement, you just push things out of the way. Whether it’s air, dust, whatever. You just appear, and things get pushed aside. The sudden and rapid displacement of things would probably be noisy, with at least a loud “pop” sound. And that raises the question of teleporting into a solid object… Maybe with this method, you just can’t do it; it feels like you’re physically trying to push aside something that’s too heavy, and you are prevented from doing so. Maybe it causes some sort of backlash that can injure you. It’s also possible that you can just do it, and the displacement is strong enough you can literally explode things by teleporting into them, and whatever mechanism causes the displacement protects you as well, at least until the building you just made unstable collapses on you, or until you suffocate after being trapped underground.

With replacement, you swap places with whatever you occupy. So, the gas in whatever spot you teleport into fills with the space you just left. Which would probably also be noisy, but less so than it would using displacement. Everything else would be similar as with displacement; you might be unable to teleport into solid objects because they resist being pulled apart, you might suffer backlash if you try, or you might just be able to do it and cause damage to whatever you teleport into.

Also, teleporting into people could potentially be a viable if absolutely disgusting weapon. I’m thinking The Boys here.

Playing around with the implications of such a power can be pretty fun, and there are a lot of ways to imagine how it might work.

10

Kinda makes you wonder. Maybe people acquire superpowers all the time in real life, but they kill themselves before they can even pick out a cape.

11

There are a lot of superpowers that need a package of other superpowers bundled with them to work properly. Imagine someone with muscles as strong as the Hulk’s, but ordinary human bones. Or a speedster, with merely mortal reflexes.

12

All those mysterious deaths attributed to “spontaneous combustion”? Folks bombarded with cosmic rays who develop the ability to generate energy beams like a superhero, with inevitably tragic results.

In the MMORPG City of Heroes, I had a character named “Swift Justice”, who was created by the US government in WW2 to be a combat speedster to help win the war. (The experiment accidentally sent him forward in time and he was thought killed in his own time when he vanished in the resulting explosion.)

Anyway, I gave him super speed, invulnerability, and martial arts powers. The idea being that his body needed to be ridiculously tough to handle traveling at high speeds, including slamming into enemies, and the martial arts training was to give him superior balance and precision control to not accidentally destroy objects and people as he zipped around.

It was a fun concept but the powerset was boring, so I ended up deleting him, but either way I liked the idea of trying to make a speedster that actually made sense.

13

The ‘safe zone’ issue was a feature of Alfred Bester’s “Tiger! Tiger!” (or later “The Stars My Destination” particularly in the US)

In that novel people had to be trained, like most skills, to teleport and they could only go places where they had been before and visualize accurately or a location near enough to directly see. And some could teleport further than others. Naturally, some could never properly develop the skill. And like phone numbers in the old days, people memorized a set of key locations, like home or major squares or intersections.

One feature of this was dedicated arrival areas that were large to minimize the chance of simultaneous arrivals. And people had to work on privacy to avoid unwanted visitors (can’t teleport where you can’t directly see and have never been before).

14

The question of what you can bring with you – or take from – places is interesting.

Especially, what counts as ‘part of you.’ Indeed, there’s no reason clothes should just come along automatically. But how about other semi-permanent parts of your body? Is it a strict “inside goes/outside stays” rule? Does the ink in all your tattoos stay behind? But piercings and scarifications stay. How about tooth caps/fillings/dentures? That artificial hip replacement? That would be a total downer to have vanish on you.

Would living versus dead tissues matter? Each time you jump you have a full-body defoliation of the topmost layers of your skin. And clearly all your hair above the skin line vanishes. You’d be bare skinned more than a new-born baby.

What about all the bacteria and such that basically inhabit your body? Do you lose all the things that help break down food, and maybe create needed-by-you by products? Or the ones that don’t actually DO anything for you, but their presence keeps nastier stuff from colonizing you?

Or even just the stuff inside your alimentary canal? In a topological sense it’s outside your body. When you jump from here, do you leave behind the chewed up mass of you last dinner? And the mostly liquified gunk your lunch has already been turned into? Not to mention the even more disgusting stuff from further along the process?

Though I suppose it would become the latest diet fad. Eat whatever you want, as much as you want. Just be sure to teleport within an hour or so the meal and you won’t have a chance of having absorbed many of the calories from it.

Just strip down and be standing in the shower before you jump.

15

Yeah, not nearly as fun as you’d think.

16

A “low tech” teleport-denial system that occurred to me years ago, that should work with the common version that won’t let you safely teleport into solid objects. A grid composed of strings or curtains of beads hanging from the ceiling, close enough together that there’s no room for a human body. Somebody who enters conventionally can just push through them easily enough, while a teleporter bounces or gets killed depending on how it works in the setting.

More likely violence, and a lot of it. If people can’t be kept from stealing things, people will go back to the old days and use fear and death as a deterrent. With more hi-tech options, like traps that automatically kill anyone who teleports into a place.

And you wouldn’t get “socialism”; you’d get constant theft, constant violence, and pervasive poverty.

There’s even a scifi/fantasy fan term for that tactic: “telefragging”.

17

I think it is pretty well established that that sound is “bamf”.

18

I did have Nightcrawler in mind when thinking about that. :wink:

Except I think he leaks out some sulfurous pink gas from whatever dimension he’s traveling through, so I’m not sure if that sound is simply from displacement. Otherwise I’d have used him as an example.

19

That’s hilarious. Like maybe those people swallowed by sinkholes caused the sinkhole. Or lightning strike victims accidentally pointed at themselves after acquiring the Jedi electricity throwing ability. Smoking in bed? Nope, uncontrolled spontaneous laser flamethrower eyes mutation.

20

Niven also wrote the non-fiction “Theory and Practice of Teleportation” (no link to the article - but you can listen to Larry read it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDRvhBU3oKE), which discussed a lot of these issues. Mentally induced teleportation leads to death if there’s relative velocity or large relative altitude (due to crashing into walls or “The bends” (or conversion of gravitational potential energy into heat) - and large changes in position on Earth all involve large relative velocity, so be careful out there.

He noted that teleportation without need for a booth on both ends leads to chaos (invasion, elimination of private property, etc.), so he wrote stories about needing booths at both ends (with mechanisms for dealing with velocity and altitude issues), which had problems enough (flash crowds, inability to move away from a stalker, etc).

See also Bester’s The Stars, My Destination - mental teleportation, but you need to be able to visualize where you’re going - so rich folks are careful about who goes into their houses, and don’t have windows to the inside. Steve Gould’s Jumper also works some changes on the topic.